Hindipedia

Happy 2012! Thank you so much for all your emails and comments.

I’m back in the new year with a special new year’s resolution: I’m going to post a Hindi video EVERY SINGLE DAY. If I miss one day, then I have to make up for it by posting two videos the next day. Please make me do it.

And tell me your new year’s resolutions in the comments.

We’ve already come across a few useful phrases in the previous lessons but we haven’t yet covered some of the most common and basic words and phrases. In the video for Lesson 6, we heard how to say quite a few new words and phrases, so the lesson notes in this case are really just to consolidate what we heard in the video and to help you remember it better by seeing things written down.

First of all we heard how to say yes and no:

Again we see the “n” on the end of haan which is pronounced as a soft nasal sound which we heard about in lesson 4, rather than as a hard “n” sound like on the end of “man”.

We also heard how to say please and thank you:

Although it’s good to know the words for “please” and “thank you”, you may notice that they are not said very often as it’s more common to use the respectful forms of pronouns and verbs to indicate politeness. But as a beginner, it doesn’t do any harm to be on the safe side when it comes to being polite, especially as it’s easy to make a mistake with different forms of verbs.

Another thing which is useful when you are first learning a language is to explain that you don’t know much of the language:

Mai bahut thori Hindi janta/i hoon – I know very little Hindi

Or

Mai bahut thori Hindi bolta/i hoon – I speak very little Hindi

“Jaana” is the verb “to know” and “bolna” is the verb “to speak”. We won’t go into detail about how to use the different forms of the verb here but you’ll get to learn that in more detail in future lessons.  But for now, just remember to adjust the “janta/i” or “bolta/i” depending on if you are male or female – “a” on the end for male and “i” on the end for female. “Bahut” is a very commonly used word which means “a lot” or “very” depending on the context. So here is means “very little” – “bahut thori”.

Hopefully you won’t need to say this sentence for too long as we continue to add more lessons! 

If you’re struggling to communicate with someone here’s how to ask if they speak English:

Kya aap angrezi bolte hain? – Do you speak English?

Here we see the word “bolte” again, “speak”, which is the same as we learnt above but with the “e” ending for the respectful form. If you ask this in Hindi, even if you can’t say much else people will appreciate that you made the effort.

If someone tries to speak Hindi to you anyway, you may need to say:

Mai samjha/i nahee – I didn’t understand

Once you progress a bit further you may want to ask:

Kripaya ek bar aur kahiye – Please repeat

Kripaya dhire boliye – Please speak more slowly

“Kahiye” and “boliye” are the imperative forms of the verbs, indicating that you are requesting someone to do something. They are also the respectful form of the imperative as we are addressing someone as “aap”. We’ll come onto this in more detail in a later lesson but here we just want to concentrate on learning the phrases.

Finally we heard how to ask what something is called in Hindi when referring to an object:

“Issko Hindi me kya bolte hain?” 

“Issko” means “this” , “me” is the word for “in” (pronounced as in “met” but without the t), and you’ll spot “bolte”, meaning to speak or say – so really we’re asking “how do you say this in Hindi?”. “Kya” is another a very useful word which means “what” but can often be used in a general sense to make a phrase into a question. In this case, it makes more sense to translate it as “how”.

The answer to the question is:

“Issko Hindi me ____ bolte hain”

In the video we heard the word “chashma” meaning “spectacles” but you can learn all sorts of other new words in this way.

You may wish to come back to this lesson for reference even once you progress further so it’s a good idea to bookmark it. And as usual, if you need any further advice or if you’re unsure about anything, please get in touch and we’ll do our best to help.